Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Graham Hancock
Graham Hancock speaking at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival
Date this lecture was recorded: June 2016
[NOTE: All quotations are by Graham Hancock.]
“Our governments are so determined to impose these insane [War on Drugs] policies upon us that the whole credit worthiness of government in every way becomes suspect, if it was not suspect already.”
“I discovered that the most important aspect of ourselves is not our body. That’s one of the lessons that ayahuasca teaches, that it’s not our bodies that are important. It’s our consciousness.”
“I have never regarded reality the same, since I began to work with ayahuasca.”
“Only a truly, psychopathically insane global human society would allow warfare to occur at all. The fact that war can snare us. The fact that we can be persuaded to go and kill other people in other lands should not be regarded as normal. This is deeply abnormal. It’s the sign of a society that’s gone terribly wrong.”
“Wherever I travel in the world I find that people are exactly the same. The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams, the same capacity to love, we are, none of us, any different.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
So today I’m going to play the second talk that fellow salonner Paul Harley recorded and sent to me.
00:00:30 ►
In my previous podcast, I played the talk that Dr. David Nutt gave at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival that Paul sent me,
00:00:38 ►
and that talk was immediately followed by the one that I’m about to play for us.
00:00:43 ►
As you will hear in just a moment, Graham Hancock asks the question,
00:00:47 ►
Do psychedelics really matter?
00:00:50 ►
And while I’m not going to try and answer that myself right now,
00:00:54 ►
I can say without question that psychedelics most definitely facilitate changes in a person’s outlook on the world.
00:01:01 ►
Several years ago I attended some conferences at which Graham spoke and he was
00:01:06 ►
speaking mainly about his archaeological work. In fact, these entire conferences were mainly about
00:01:12 ►
the esoteric archaeology that people like John Anthony West were writing about. And it was at
00:01:19 ►
one of these conferences that, well, as far as I know, Graham Hancock first came out publicly and discussed his ayahuasca
00:01:26 ►
experiences. In fact, it happened to be the very day his new book, Supernatural, was published.
00:01:33 ►
And the first public talk about his psychedelics was given in the evening, after the conference
00:01:39 ►
was technically over for the day, and we weren’t allowed to record it, because, well, back then, almost any connection
00:01:46 ►
whatsoever with psychedelics would be a death blow for publicly acclaimed people like Graham Hancock.
00:01:53 ►
You know, just like the N-word is today, at the beginning of this century, the P-word, psychedelic,
00:01:59 ►
was just as toxic. And so we all thought that he was being exceptionally brave to talk about his psychedelic
00:02:05 ►
experiences in public, even though it was at a relatively obscure conference. Well, since then,
00:02:12 ►
he has had considerably more experience with these marvelous substances, and as you will now hear,
00:02:18 ►
Graham Hancock is an unabashed advocate of ending this insane war on people who use
00:02:23 ►
non-prescription drugs. So do psychedelics
00:02:26 ►
matter? Well, at least in the life of Graham Hancock, and in my own life as well, the answer
00:02:32 ►
is a definitive yes. So now let’s rejoin the audience at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival where
00:02:38 ►
Dr. David Nutt had just finished speaking and learn about Graham Hancock’s answer to the question that he just posed.
00:02:49 ►
Thank you. Thank you for being here.
00:02:53 ►
It was fascinating to listen to Professor David Nutt just now.
00:03:00 ►
I just come from America, and it’s interesting what’s happening there.
00:03:06 ►
In a state like Colorado, you can actually be treated like an adult.
00:03:13 ►
It’s a really interesting thing.
00:03:15 ►
America was at the… it’s the power behind the war on drugs.
00:03:28 ►
the war on drugs. And yet, state by state in America, the war on drugs is being wrecked and destroyed by the people themselves. The people are stopping the war on drugs. I wish
00:03:34 ►
we had the same kind of system in Britain where, I don’t know, Yorkshire or Somerset
00:03:40 ►
could put one finger up to central government and say, fuck you, we’re going to make Canada’s legal.
00:03:47 ►
And maybe that’s what’s needed.
00:03:50 ►
Maybe there’s some kind of revolution in the making here.
00:03:56 ►
Our governments are so determined to impose these insane policies upon us that the whole creditworthiness of government in
00:04:09 ►
every way becomes suspect if it was not suspect already.
00:04:16 ►
I’m here to ask the question and try to offer some answers whether do psychedelics matter.
00:04:28 ►
some answers whether do psychedelics do psychedelics matter and obviously i think that psychedelics psychedelics matter a great deal uh let me start with with a little bit of my personal story
00:04:37 ►
i came well my first experience with psychedelics was ls in 1974, probably before most of you were
00:04:49 ►
born, at a thing called the Windsor Free Festival.
00:04:54 ►
I went there with three friends.
00:04:56 ►
I didn’t know anything about psychedelics, but we were offered this little tablet, which
00:05:01 ►
we cut into three pieces, and then we had one third of it each. And I had
00:05:07 ►
an absolutely amazing experience that night. The Windsor Free Festival was a bit like Glastonbury
00:05:15 ►
actually. And I regard that event as the true end of the 1960s. I spent the entire night, 12 hours, just walking around this amazing
00:05:27 ►
festival and I found myself transported back in time. I convinced myself that I was back
00:05:36 ►
in the Viking age and that each encampment that I came to with these long-haired people was a little Viking encampment. I had all kinds of
00:05:47 ►
adventures. I found a tree in which I believed that there was a giant spider, and the giant
00:05:54 ►
spider was wrapping people up in cocoons. At the same time, I realized that those cocoons were
00:06:00 ►
sleeping bags. I carried on walking all night. It was amazing. I found
00:06:07 ►
myself talking to flowers, communing with the stars. It was just an incredibly beautiful,
00:06:15 ►
mind-opening, very powerful experience. When I got back to the tent, I found that one of
00:06:23 ►
my three friends was sitting there in the tent in
00:06:25 ►
a state of total collapse he’d had a he’d had an absolutely horrific night he
00:06:32 ►
was he was terrified there was no meaning in life and so I said well look
00:06:36 ►
come for a walk let’s let’s let’s go for a walk and we walked around. And off through the fields in the distance,
00:06:45 ►
I saw what I took to be a line of blue elves
00:06:50 ►
who were walking towards us, waving some kind of sticks.
00:06:55 ►
And I turned to my friend and I said,
00:06:57 ►
what the fuck are those elves doing there?
00:07:00 ►
And he said, those aren’t fucking elves.
00:07:02 ►
Those are policemen.
00:07:09 ►
And I said, are you serious? And he said, yeah, and they’re coming this way, we better run.
00:07:19 ►
And actually they smashed up that entire festival, and that’s why I regard it as the real end of the 1960s.
00:07:24 ►
Now, after that, I looked at my friend and his experience.
00:07:30 ►
While I say this, let me just tell a small anecdote about the late, great Terence McKenna.
00:07:42 ►
And this anecdote is told to me by my friend Luis Eduardo Luna, who knew Terence from the early 1970s.
00:07:45 ►
And Luis is a shaman with whom I frequently drink ayahuasca Lewis tells this story about Terence the Terence had taken a heroic
00:07:53 ►
dose of psilocybin however nothing was happening and he was saying to himself
00:08:00 ►
it’s not strong enough it’s not strong enough so he took another
00:08:06 ►
heroic dose of psilocybin and sometime afterwards the universe began to melt
00:08:13 ►
down around him in a state of total chaos and collapse and then a voice voice spoke in his ear and said, is that strong enough for you, asshole? So after my LSD experience,
00:08:31 ►
I was frankly afraid, although I’d had a wonderful experience. I thought, what happens if that
00:08:40 ►
experience went the other way? What happened if I had an experience like my friend had?
00:08:46 ►
And for many, many years after that, although I became a regular user of cannabis, I never
00:08:54 ►
took another psychedelic. And in fact, I didn’t take another psychedelic until 2003. That’s
00:09:00 ►
how many years ago? 30 years later. And the reason I initially did so was that I was writing a book called Supernatural,
00:09:08 ►
Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, which looked at the role of altered states of consciousness in the human experience.
00:09:17 ►
And I’ve always felt as a writer that I can’t authentically write about anything if I don’t have the experience myself.
00:09:24 ►
authentically write about anything if I don’t have the experience myself.
00:09:30 ►
I was interested in rock and cave art around the world,
00:09:35 ►
and the suggestion that this was inspired by visionary experiences in psychedelic states.
00:09:41 ►
And lo and behold, I discovered that in the Amazon jungle in South America,
00:09:46 ►
shamans use ayahuasca to enter deeply altered states of consciousness,
00:09:53 ►
and afterwards they often come out of that visionary state and paint the imagery that they have seen in their visions. And this is exactly what was suggested about cave art.
00:09:57 ►
So it was obvious to me that I had to go to the Amazon and I had to drink ayahuasca.
00:10:02 ►
and I had to drink ayahuasca.
00:10:10 ►
So I found myself in early 2004 in the Amazon rainforest,
00:10:16 ►
in a clearing with half a dozen other people and a shaman,
00:10:23 ►
and I’m given this truly smelly and disgusting tasting brew to drink. How many here have drunk ayahuasca?
00:10:23 ►
and disgusting tasting brew to drink.
00:10:24 ►
How many here have drunk ayahuasca?
00:10:32 ►
Yeah, I mean, those who’ve drunk it will know that it’s not an easy thing to drink. It tastes bad, maybe a mixture of essence of old socks, some raw sewage, a bit of sulfur,
00:10:43 ►
some battery acid, and just a hint of chocolate.
00:10:47 ►
After about 45 minutes, your system begins to feel decidedly strange.
00:10:54 ►
You feel perhaps a little nauseous, little ominous rumblings in the stomach,
00:11:00 ►
and you realize that you’re not quite where you were before. It’s very difficult
00:11:08 ►
to deal with the physical aspects of ayahuasca, particularly in the jungle. They call it the
00:11:14 ►
purge for a very good reason, is that it makes you shit buckets, basically. And I found myself
00:11:22 ►
after about an hour and a half, not in a deeply visionary state,
00:11:26 ►
but desperately needing to have a shit.
00:11:31 ►
And, you know, we Brits are very inhibited, and it seemed very odd that I was going to just,
00:11:36 ►
like, in earshot of these people, I was going to go behind a tree and drop my pants and relieve myself.
00:11:42 ►
But there was no other alternative. I had to do that. So I did so, and while I’m squatting there, I look up at this tree and drop my pants and relieve myself. But there was no other alternative. I had to do that.
00:11:45 ►
So I did so. And while I’m squatting there, I look up at this tree and realize that the spider
00:11:50 ►
I’m looking at actually isn’t there. It’s in my head. And I come back to the circle. And that’s
00:11:58 ►
when I discovered that the most important aspect of ourselves is not our bodies.
00:12:07 ►
That’s one of the lessons that ayahuasca teaches,
00:12:11 ►
that it’s not our bodies that are important, it’s our consciousness.
00:12:14 ►
And what’s happening at the level of consciousness,
00:12:18 ►
when you allow it in, when you surrender to the experience,
00:12:22 ►
is utterly extraordinary and transformatory.
00:12:28 ►
I carried on, I had a series of 11 sessions with ayahuasca in the Amazon. It gave me enough material to write my book, but it also taught me that I had very far
00:12:36 ►
to go, that I had enrolled in some kind of school, the school of Mother Ayahuasca, and the school of mother ayahuasca and the school had lessons to teach me about
00:12:47 ►
myself and about the nature of reality I have never regarded reality the same
00:12:55 ►
since I began to work with with ayahuasca and so I’ve continued the work
00:13:00 ►
I try to have one or two sometimes as many as five sessions with ayahuasca
00:13:06 ►
each year and I’m doing that because I still feel that I have many lessons to
00:13:12 ►
learn ayahuasca is a wonderfully socially integrative medicine it teaches
00:13:20 ►
us who we are and the impact that we have upon others and it urges us to look at that impact
00:13:27 ►
and to make ourselves better, more nurturing, more positive human beings.
00:13:35 ►
This is really a universal experience with ayahuasca. People who drink ayahuasca anywhere
00:13:40 ►
in the world find themselves reviewing their own conduct and looking for ways to make
00:13:45 ►
themselves better people to be more helpful and more useful to others so why on earth would any
00:13:54 ►
society like ours seek to make ayahuasca and other psychedelics illegal why would it why would it do
00:14:02 ►
that when when the effects of these substances are incredibly positive and
00:14:07 ►
helpful and truly and honestly do help us to be more nurturing, more positive, more loving
00:14:14 ►
human beings? It’s not a magic pill. It’s not like you drink ayahuasca and get instant enlightenment.
00:14:22 ►
What it is, is the beginning of a long process of work. It’s one
00:14:26 ►
thing to get the understanding, to understand what you need to do, what you need to change.
00:14:32 ►
It’s another thing to integrate those changes into your life and actually act them out. And
00:14:37 ►
that’s where the work comes. That’s where it’s really not easy at all. It’s very, very difficult
00:14:42 ►
to change a lifetime of bad habits.
00:14:45 ►
But ayahuasca offers us a way to do so.
00:14:48 ►
I’m not saying it’s the only way.
00:14:50 ►
There’s lots of other ways to do so.
00:14:52 ►
But maybe in a highly materialistic, controlling, dominated society,
00:14:59 ►
maybe many of us really need the help of the ancient and sacred plants to break our minds free from the chains that have been imposed upon them.
00:15:11 ►
Because we do clearly live in an insane society.
00:15:29 ►
The society that we live in is, by any definition, psychopathically insane and unconscious.
00:15:42 ►
And massive, massive forces are at work using our tax money to keep things that way.
00:15:47 ►
This insanity is evident at a global level.
00:15:54 ►
Only a truly psychopathically insane global human society would allow warfare to occur at all.
00:16:00 ►
The fact that wars occur,
00:16:01 ►
the fact that we can be persuaded to go and kill other people in other lands,
00:16:09 ►
should not be regarded as normal.
00:16:12 ►
This is deeply abnormal.
00:16:14 ►
It’s a sign of a society that’s gone terribly wrong.
00:16:18 ►
And then there’s the issue of the rainforests.
00:16:23 ►
There’s the issue of the rainforests.
00:16:36 ►
What kind of global society is it that can stand by and allow the precious resource of biodiversity that is the Amazon, that sacred realm,
00:16:40 ►
just stand by and allow it to be destroyed. Allow those trees to be cut down, great clearances to take place, to grow
00:16:48 ►
soya beans, to feed cattle, so that some of us can eat hamburgers. Not me, because I’m
00:16:54 ►
a vegetarian, but, you know, some of us. What kind of society could allow that? A rational,
00:17:08 ►
could allow that. A rational, conscious, sane society would look at the economic predicament of the peoples of the Amazon and say to them, you are amidst one of the most precious resources
00:17:16 ►
on earth. We would like to make your lives easy so that that resource can be looked after,
00:17:22 ►
nurtured for the whole planet. But we don’t do that.
00:17:26 ►
There’s no initiative at all to do anything like that.
00:17:32 ►
Instead, what’s the big money going into?
00:17:34 ►
The big money is going into weapons of mass destruction,
00:17:38 ►
so that we can come up with ever more cunning and devious ways
00:17:44 ►
to murder one another on a global scale.
00:17:48 ►
No problem in raising trillions of dollars for battleships and aircraft carriers and
00:17:54 ►
fighter aircraft and helicopters, any machine which can be used to destroy fellow human beings.
00:18:02 ►
We have no problem raising money for that. But to raise the money,
00:18:06 ►
to make it worthwhile for the peoples of the Amazon
00:18:08 ►
never to allow another tree to be cut down,
00:18:11 ►
we can’t even begin to think about that idea.
00:18:14 ►
And it would be peanuts by comparison
00:18:16 ►
with the expenditure on weapons of mass destruction.
00:18:22 ►
Then there’s the issue of global pollution, that we’re poisoning
00:18:28 ►
this beautiful garden of a planet on which we live. We’re poisoning it at a vast collective
00:18:35 ►
level, and nobody’s taking any responsibility for that. And at the level of individuals, our society encourages us to be producers and consumers of
00:18:49 ►
material goods and nothing more. It encourages us to identify our egos with what we own rather than
00:18:57 ►
with who we are. It encourages us to put ourselves first and everybody else second.
00:19:05 ►
And these to me are all symptoms of a global society that is completely and utterly insane.
00:19:17 ►
We have passed, I think, the moment, the time in history when nationalism was of any use.
00:19:29 ►
And yet, in the tendencies that are at work in the world today, there is more and more focus on
00:19:36 ►
nation and on patriotism. Why, I ask myself, why should I feel this emotion of patriotism?
00:19:46 ►
Why should I especially like or trust or love somebody
00:19:50 ►
just because they happen to be born on the same piece of land as me?
00:19:54 ►
Which means that their parents fucked on the same piece of land that my parents fucked on.
00:19:59 ►
Why does that make them have anything special in common with me?
00:20:04 ►
Why should I be willing to
00:20:06 ►
actually go out and kill people of other
00:20:08 ►
nations just because I was born
00:20:10 ►
accidentally in
00:20:12 ►
this nation?
00:20:14 ►
It’s
00:20:15 ►
a symptom of a deeper problem
00:20:18 ►
which is the creation of artificial
00:20:20 ►
boundaries. Artificial
00:20:22 ►
boundaries between us. We are
00:20:24 ►
all one human family. We are all one human family.
00:20:27 ►
We are all brothers and sisters.
00:20:32 ►
You know, I have to say this.
00:20:34 ►
I witnessed a little thing happened
00:20:37 ►
as we were on our way in here today.
00:20:39 ►
My wife, Santa, who’s standing over there,
00:20:41 ►
is a person of color.
00:20:43 ►
Santa was in the back of the car.
00:20:45 ►
I was in the front. We passed one of the stewards and then the steward shouted, hey, who’s that in the
00:20:49 ►
back? And stopped us. And I realized immediately what was going on because that happens again and
00:20:55 ►
again. That racial profiling was going on and that that person saw a person of color and decided that
00:21:02 ►
they might be suspect in some way. I don’t think that person was
00:21:05 ►
consciously racist, but that racism is deeply ingrained in the psyche and it’s part of
00:21:12 ►
these artificial boundaries that are created. Wherever I travel in the world,
00:21:18 ►
I find that people are exactly the same. The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams, the same capacity to love.
00:21:27 ►
We are none of us any different. It’s absurd to suggest that we are.
00:21:31 ►
And this new focus on nationalism is, in my view, a profoundly regressive step which is taking place.
00:21:41 ►
which is taking place.
00:21:45 ►
Don’t get me wrong.
00:21:50 ►
I’m not for one world government.
00:21:52 ►
I’m not for any government.
00:21:53 ►
I’m an anarchist.
00:21:57 ►
We don’t need governments.
00:22:00 ►
We don’t need states telling us what to do. In my opinion, the role of government in our society
00:22:04 ►
needs to be wound
00:22:05 ►
back very, very far. And we need to start relating to one another responsibly as individuals
00:22:11 ►
without hiding that responsibility off onto governments who are funded with our money.
00:22:20 ►
It’s a really most unfortunate situation that’s developing in the world.
00:22:25 ►
And the thing is that the societies, the governments, the nations that have made drugs illegal,
00:22:33 ►
that have created that evil and monstrous enterprise called the war on drugs,
00:22:39 ►
they are the same societies that are responsible, the same governments that are responsible for all the
00:22:45 ►
ills that are taking place in the world. Why should we listen to a single fucking word
00:22:49 ►
they say? They’re obviously mad. They’re completely discredited in every area. They’re
00:22:56 ►
consummate liars and deceivers. Of course they’re lying to us and deceiving us about psychedelics. Now, as David pointed out, psychedelics have
00:23:10 ►
been part of the human story since the very beginning. There’s archaeological evidence
00:23:17 ►
for the use of ayahuasca in the Amazon going back more than 4,000 years. I’m convinced
00:23:22 ►
it goes much further back than that human
00:23:26 ►
human society in fact there’s a case to be made that and Terence McKenna was one
00:23:32 ►
of the first to make this case and he did so in a brilliant way in his book
00:23:35 ►
food of the gods that the emergence of modern human consciousness is a product
00:23:40 ►
of psychedelic use it’s very clear if you go back to the painted caves and you look at the cave art, the ancient art that was created there, that this is visionary
00:23:52 ►
art. And the emergence of this art is accompanied by what is regarded as the single most important
00:23:59 ►
step forward in the evolution in human behavior. That’s when our ancestors seemed to acquire notions of spirituality.
00:24:07 ►
They begin to bury grave goods, food and water with the dead.
00:24:13 ►
And as a matter of fact, they start burying the dead for the first time.
00:24:16 ►
The grave goods tell us that those societies had learned,
00:24:22 ►
had understood that death is not the end,
00:24:25 ►
that death is the beginning perhaps of the next great adventure,
00:24:29 ►
that some aspect of the human being survives physical death and carries on.
00:24:35 ►
And it comes back to this point that we are not our bodies.
00:24:39 ►
We are our consciousness.
00:24:43 ►
And the mystery of consciousness is huge and profound.
00:24:47 ►
We don’t know really what consciousness is.
00:24:50 ►
We can’t explain it.
00:24:52 ►
But one of the ways to get to grips with the mystery of consciousness
00:24:57 ►
is provided to us by generous nature herself,
00:25:00 ►
in the form of the psychedelics.
00:25:03 ►
They are one of the most effective routes
00:25:05 ►
for understanding what consciousness is all about.
00:25:12 ►
And I think that we need to keep that very much in mind.
00:25:19 ►
The historical context of psychedelics worldwide,
00:25:22 ►
up until modern times really
00:25:25 ►
up until the last century has been a context of wise and intelligent use of
00:25:32 ►
psychedelics for the betterment of society it’s really only us it’s only
00:25:36 ►
Western technological civilization with its with its focus on machines with its focus on machines, with its death culture, which has made psychedelics illegal.
00:25:49 ►
And I don’t think we should be surprised that our governments lie to us about drugs
00:25:55 ►
and lie to us about psychedelics and seek to make them illegal.
00:25:59 ►
Because there’s a really big difference between alcohol,
00:26:03 ►
which I regard as the most boring drug on the planet, and psychedelics.
00:26:09 ►
Alcohol does not lead to a questioning of the prevailing control system in our society.
00:26:18 ►
Alcohol serves the control system in our society.
00:26:29 ►
in our society. It allows people to carry on being functional producers and consumers by giving them a little holiday at the end of the day before they go back and do it all
00:26:35 ►
again the next day. It doesn’t lead to any profound questioning about the nature of society
00:26:42 ►
or about why things are the way they are or about the nature of society, or about why things are the way they are, or about the nature of reality. Psychedelics do lead to that profound questioning. First of all,
00:26:50 ►
as David rightly said, they are far less dangerous than alcohol. In fact, really,
00:26:54 ►
psychedelics aren’t dangerous at all. Sure, people can have terrifying experiences on psychedelics,
00:27:00 ►
but normally what happens as time goes by is you realize that that terrifying
00:27:05 ►
experience taught you something of great value to yourself often i think we have to we have to
00:27:10 ►
overcome our fears in order to in order to learn and and that’s why they the shamans say in the
00:27:19 ►
amazon after you’ve drunk the brew when that huge serpent 300 meters long comes towards you and opens its
00:27:30 ►
jaws wide don’t run away just dive right into those jaws get right into it nurture your courage
00:27:37 ►
and and and and this this learning about about courage is is is an important aspect of the psychedelic experience.
00:27:47 ►
But fundamentally, we are dealing with substances that lead to questioning of the existing control system in our society.
00:27:58 ►
And that is obviously regarded as very dangerous by the powers that be. And that, as David rightly said, is why we have these hysterical media campaigns,
00:28:07 ►
which seek to stir up fear and hatred and suspicion around the subject of psychedelics.
00:28:15 ►
And finally has brought us to this ridiculous situation in Britain
00:28:19 ►
where all psychoactive substances except these, everyone’s, are illegal.
00:28:26 ►
Now, I can’t understand how politicians can live with themselves
00:28:32 ►
when they allow such laws to be brought into place.
00:28:37 ►
I mean, we trumpet, we make a big fuss, a big noise about the idea that we live in a free society.
00:28:45 ►
You’ll hear most of our politicians praising our democracy and its wonderful effects.
00:28:52 ►
Well, first of all, I’d like to make the point that the fact that we live in a democracy
00:28:56 ►
doesn’t mean that we live in a free society at all.
00:28:59 ►
Actually, what it means is that we live in a very mind-controlled society. Because democracy only works when you have total honesty, total transparency, complete openness, no facts hidden, no big money being put into advancing particular points of view.
00:29:19 ►
Instead, in our society, the opposite is true.
00:29:22 ►
It’s secretive, hidden, occult. Huge money is put into lobbying
00:29:28 ►
to advance particular positions and to destroy other positions. So what triumphs in democracy
00:29:35 ►
is not the best ideas. It’s the ideas with the most power and money behind them. And in that
00:29:42 ►
sense, it’s absurd to say that we live in a free society I think we live in one of the most mind-controlled side societies that
00:29:50 ►
has ever existed on planet Earth and it’s a terrifying and deadly society
00:29:58 ►
which is which is ready to make war upon others and murder them. It is truly a psychopathic society.
00:30:07 ►
But another aspect of this is the very notion of freedom.
00:30:11 ►
What is this idea of freedom?
00:30:14 ►
How can politicians stand up there and say,
00:30:17 ►
we live in a free society,
00:30:20 ►
when at the same time they will send us to prison
00:30:24 ►
and ruin our lives for exploring the mystery of our own consciousness with psychedelics.
00:30:31 ►
There is nothing more personal, more individual, more sapient, more close to ourselves than our consciousness.
00:30:40 ►
And somehow, by some trick, we’ve been persuaded to hand over the keys of our own consciousness to the state.
00:30:51 ►
It’s utterly, utterly meaningless to talk about freedom of any kind when we have no freedom of consciousness.
00:31:06 ►
freedom of consciousness, when we can only assert our freedom of consciousness at personal risk by breaking laws that could lead to our imprisonment and worse. It’s absurd to suggest
00:31:12 ►
that we’re free in that society. If we do not have sovereignty over consciousness, we don’t
00:31:17 ►
have sovereignty of any sort. And therefore, to me, this is an absolutely fundamental issue concerning the kind of society that we live in today.
00:31:29 ►
Fortunately, things are changing.
00:31:31 ►
People are waking up all around the world.
00:31:34 ►
It’s my privilege to travel a great deal, to talk to people in many countries.
00:31:38 ►
And what I see everywhere are gatherings like this.
00:31:41 ►
People who are awake, who are conscious,
00:31:47 ►
who know what the fuck is going on.
00:31:48 ►
You know?
00:31:52 ►
And part of the reason we know that is because psychedelics have whispered in our ear
00:31:55 ►
and just brought us forward and opened,
00:31:59 ►
opened the curtain a little bit.
00:32:01 ►
And we’ve seen the wizard behind the curtain.
00:32:04 ►
We’ve seen who wizard behind the curtain we’ve seen who
00:32:05 ►
is manipulating us we understand that we live in a world of lies things are
00:32:11 ►
changing because people are waking up and I’m fundamentally very optimistic
00:32:16 ►
about the future of humanity I think that there is a tremendous correction underway at the moment and it’s a correction that is going to change
00:32:29 ►
everything within two centuries if the human race survives if the dominator psychopaths don’t get
00:32:37 ►
their way then this time will be looked back upon as a time of extraordinary dramatic and beautiful change in the human story we we find it
00:32:50 ►
hard to see that because we’re caught up in the struggle of that change right now but something
00:32:55 ►
amazing and something remarkable is happening which is going to change everything we’re beginning to
00:33:02 ►
see some some of these developments with David Nutt’s research,
00:33:07 ►
with the very fact that against all odds and against all opposition, he’s been able to
00:33:13 ►
do that research and bring to light more of the mysteries of psychedelics. We’re beginning
00:33:20 ►
to see that awakening in the state-by-state legalization of cannabis in the United States.
00:33:26 ►
That’s the people asserting themselves and saying,
00:33:30 ►
it is our right to make decisions about our own consciousness and our own bodies
00:33:37 ►
while doing no harm to others.
00:33:39 ►
And it’s none of the fucking business of the state.
00:33:41 ►
The state does not belong there.
00:33:43 ►
The state has no place inside our heads.
00:33:48 ►
My hope is that the very absurdity of the drug war, the very absurdity of the ridiculous,
00:33:56 ►
monstrous, psychoactive substances act, that this very absurdity will prove to have been a step too far for the state, and that it will begin
00:34:05 ►
to unravel itself. In summary, I think that psychedelics matter because they’re at the
00:34:16 ►
cutting edge of real meaningful change in our society. If you go back three or four hundred years, you will find a time
00:34:29 ►
when people who knew that the earth goes around the sun, when people who knew that and said that
00:34:39 ►
were called heretics. People who knew that and said that could be burnt at the stake
00:34:47 ►
for suggesting that actually the earth goes around the sun rather than the other way around because
00:34:53 ►
until then it was believed that the sun went around the earth the heliocentric model was a
00:34:59 ►
great heresy galileo was forced to recant Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake
00:35:06 ►
in February 1601 in Rome they ensured that his death lasted almost two days
00:35:13 ►
they kept the fire very slow to punish him for his absolute conviction that we
00:35:20 ►
live in a heliocentric solar system that the earth goes around the sun uh this was a
00:35:26 ►
regarded as a tremendous heresy at the time as an attack on the on the fundamentals of society
00:35:31 ►
giordano bruno was was presented as a as a monstrous demonic figure who deserved to be
00:35:38 ►
burned at the stake well we don’t burn people at the stake anymore today although i think there are
00:35:43 ►
many in our government who would like to do so we don’t burn people at the stake anymore today, although I think there are many in our government who would like to do so.
00:35:46 ►
We don’t burn people at the stake.
00:35:48 ►
Instead, we ruin their lives, imprison them,
00:35:51 ►
and fuck them up in every possible way
00:35:54 ►
for working with psychedelics and other substances.
00:36:00 ►
I think that those of us who are heretics today,
00:36:07 ►
heretics over the issue of psychedelics,
00:36:11 ►
we need to speak our truth. We need to speak it openly.
00:36:15 ►
We need to come out of the closet, even though there is personal risk,
00:36:23 ►
and say that these substances, used responsibly, used wisely, used in a nurturing and positive way,
00:36:28 ►
with love, with good are incredible instruments incredible instruments for for personal development and for for realizing the nature of the universe
00:36:34 ►
a fundamental shift of reference frame is underway and that’s why I think psychedelics matter, because they’re absolutely central to that. We have been in a system that is focused on materialism.
00:36:51 ►
And when I say materialism, I don’t just mean the love of material things.
00:36:56 ►
Materialism is a philosophy which views everything as reducible to matter,
00:37:04 ►
which views everything as reducible to matter,
00:37:12 ►
that there is no non-physical component to consciousness or to reality.
00:37:16 ►
That’s the system that we live in, and that’s what psychedelics challenge,
00:37:19 ►
because psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
00:37:24 ►
They dissolve boundaries between us and our neighbors and people of other nations.
00:37:25 ►
They dissolve boundaries between us and our neighbors and people of other nations. They dissolve boundaries between us and the universe.
00:37:28 ►
As Terence McKenna said, they dissolve boundaries between us and our cat, even between us and our washing machine.
00:37:37 ►
Psychedelics dissolve boundaries and they lead to a fundamental questioning of the reference frame of materialism. So it’s a brilliant
00:37:47 ►
thing today, even if painful, even if difficult, to be a heretic. Speak out for
00:37:53 ►
heresy. Speak out for your truth. Speak out for the future of humanity, which is
00:37:59 ►
not a future of endless war, which is not a future of endless production and consumption, which is not a future
00:38:07 ►
of the mindless pursuit of short-term profits, but which is a future that recognizes the fundamental
00:38:13 ►
unity of the whole human family. We are so, thank you, we are so locked down by the society that we live in that we desperately now need the help of the ancient and sacred plants to break out of those chains and find ourselves in the world that can be. That’s why a kind of reverse missionary activity is taking place in the world today.
00:38:47 ►
It used to be that it was the white man from the north who went to the south bringing the
00:38:54 ►
good news of, by God, good news of Christianity. That was the missionary model. But now we
00:39:02 ►
have other missionaries because shamans from the amazon
00:39:06 ►
are traveling all throughout the western world and they are here to help to heal the sickness
00:39:13 ►
of the west and the sickness of the west is that we have completely severed our connection with
00:39:19 ►
spirit and if we do not reconnect with spirit and if we don’t do so soon, then the future of the world can be very dark.
00:39:29 ►
So the spread of ayahuasca around the Western world, you can drink ayahuasca anywhere now.
00:39:36 ►
It’s available everywhere. In any major city.
00:39:40 ►
I’ve drunk ayahuasca in Tokyo, I’ve drunk it in Los Angeles, I’ve drunk it in London as well as in the Amazon. And this is a missionary process that’s taking place. We are in need of
00:39:52 ►
help. We are in need of the good news that ayahuasca brings. Now with saying that, I also
00:40:00 ►
want to say that not is all rosy, not is all beautiful in the psychedelic garden. One of the
00:40:06 ►
things that I’ve observed with ayahuasca, and I guess it’s inevitable since we live in an insane
00:40:12 ►
society, is that there are individuals who are using ayahuasca for personal gain. There are
00:40:17 ►
individuals who are using ayahuasca to gain power over others. One of the things with ayahuasca is that you have to surrender.
00:40:27 ►
You have to lower your shields. That’s the way that the medicine can begin to work at
00:40:31 ►
you. But when you lower your shields, you are also lowering them to any psychic vampire
00:40:36 ►
who happens to be in the group drinking with you. And I have seen negative consequences
00:40:41 ►
from this. We need to find a new way forward to work with these powerful
00:40:46 ►
medicines in a way that brings out their best potential for all of us. But how can we do that
00:40:52 ►
in a society where all of these medicines are universally illegal? We need to change that
00:40:59 ►
situation. Just as the heretics of the 16th and 17th centuries changed the situation,
00:41:07 ►
as more and more new evidence came out which could not be explained by the previous earth-centered paradigm,
00:41:14 ►
it became obvious that those who held to the earth-centered paradigm were, in fact, completely wrong.
00:41:21 ►
And it’s going to be the case with psychedelics too.
00:41:27 ►
completely wrong. And it’s going to be the case with psychedelics too. We’re going to see more and more evidence coming out that can’t be explained by the paradigm of the war on drugs,
00:41:32 ►
by the paradigm that says these substances are just evil and bad and useless. We’re going to
00:41:38 ►
see transformations taking place that are of great importance. And as time goes by, what was a heresy will come
00:41:47 ►
to be understood as right. So my appeal to all of you is to proudly stand up and be a
00:41:54 ►
heretic. Never allow a politician to get away with any statement about the war on drugs. The war on drugs is a huge error of our society
00:42:07 ►
and an error that desperately needs to be changed
00:42:10 ►
because it is fundamentally about individual freedom of consciousness.
00:42:17 ►
And I think there’s nothing more important than that.
00:42:23 ►
so I would
00:42:26 ►
love to take some questions if there are
00:42:29 ►
any questions and discussions
00:42:31 ►
we have a few minutes
00:42:32 ►
yes
00:42:34 ►
where is my ayahuasca
00:42:36 ►
as I said I came from
00:42:40 ►
I came here from a trip in the US
00:42:42 ►
and boy was it a trip
00:42:44 ►
we went up to Mount Shasta
00:42:47 ►
and there we worked
00:42:49 ►
actually with an Englishman
00:42:50 ►
who’s a shaman up there
00:42:52 ►
but he trained amongst the Shipibo in Peru
00:42:54 ►
and on the Friday night
00:42:57 ►
he gave us
00:43:00 ►
a very powerful
00:43:02 ►
ayahuasca brew
00:43:03 ►
and we had an extraordinary night of of revelations
00:43:09 ►
um i actually was it was uh one of the occasions where ayahuasca really took me by surprise
00:43:17 ►
because um i passed through almost the whole night until about three in the morning without having any visions at all.
00:43:27 ►
And in a way, there was a kind of sigh of relief, you know, that I kind of got away lightly without being snatched away to a seamlessly convincing parallel universe.
00:43:37 ►
But then I started to feel a bit hungry and I ate some watermelon.
00:43:41 ►
And I don’t know what that did to me, but it somehow released the ayahuasca that was maybe stuck in the pit of my stomach and and suddenly I
00:43:49 ►
found myself with a with a full-on one of the most powerful visionary
00:43:53 ►
experiences that I’ve ever had in my life utterly extraordinary a little bit
00:43:59 ►
scary but but the the scary aspect of it was was worth going through then the next
00:44:05 ►
day we usually after an ayahuasca session you do a sharing you you share
00:44:10 ►
with other members of the group the experiences that you’ve had during the
00:44:13 ►
night and then come two o’clock in the afternoon we drank another brew this
00:44:18 ►
time not ayahuasca but San Pedro what Yuma which is made from the San Pedro, Huachuma, which is made from the San Pedro cactus,
00:44:25 ►
which grows in South America, and where the active ingredient is mescaline.
00:44:31 ►
And boy, that was an extraordinary experience as well.
00:44:34 ►
It’s the first time I’ve ever experienced San Pedro.
00:44:37 ►
I have a friend in the audience who actually gave me some San Pedro many years ago,
00:44:41 ►
but I didn’t take it at that time.
00:44:43 ►
This time in Manchester, I did, and the effects lasted for 12 hours I did feel slightly nauseous all day
00:44:50 ►
because I had eaten something in the morning which was a mistake but I found
00:44:54 ►
myself incredibly at one with the universe it didn’t seem absurd to hug a
00:45:01 ►
tree and to talk to a tree in, I spent the whole afternoon hugging and
00:45:05 ►
talking to trees and looking up at the wonderful Mount Shasta covered with snow looming above us
00:45:14 ►
and realizing that this mountain is conscious. This mountain is alive. This planet is alive.
00:45:20 ►
Everything is alive. It’s not dead matter as we are taught by the society we live in
00:45:26 ►
so in the answer to
00:45:28 ►
where is my ayahuasca, I guess it’s
00:45:29 ►
still inside me
00:45:30 ►
yes
00:45:34 ►
so your question is
00:45:39 ►
do I think that the plants are
00:45:41 ►
actually going to become angry with us
00:45:43 ►
about the way that we’re handling and managing them not giving them the respect yeah well
00:45:52 ►
that’s a that’s that’s a that’s a fair point I mean what one thing I’ve come to
00:45:56 ►
understand over the last decade is that plants are conscious they’re fully
00:46:01 ►
conscious is a mistake to think of them as just kind of biomass.
00:46:06 ►
Actually what I think plants are, perhaps not all
00:46:08 ►
of them the same, but what plants
00:46:10 ►
are, the ayahuasca
00:46:12 ►
vine, the chacruna
00:46:14 ►
leaves, psilocybin
00:46:16 ►
mushrooms, what they are
00:46:18 ►
is the antennae
00:46:20 ►
in the
00:46:22 ►
physical plane of
00:46:24 ►
vast cosmic intelligences and those vast
00:46:28 ►
cosmic intelligences are interested in the earth and they’re interested in the
00:46:33 ►
future of this amazing planet I mean it’s probable that there are millions of
00:46:38 ►
garden planets like the earth it’s probable that millions of them are
00:46:44 ►
populated by intelligent
00:46:46 ►
life, but we don’t know that. Right now, all we know is that this one is here. And based
00:46:53 ►
on that knowledge, we should regard this planet and our opportunity to be born in a human
00:46:58 ►
body upon this planet as an incredible gift, an incredible privilege, something to be celebrated and
00:47:07 ►
honored every day.
00:47:08 ►
And the sacred plants help us to do that.
00:47:12 ►
I’m not saying everybody needs them.
00:47:14 ►
There are people who are born with a bypass to the dominated system.
00:47:19 ►
But for those of us who’ve been pushed down by the dominated system, these plant allies
00:47:24 ►
are the best hope we have. and might they become annoyed with us for the way that
00:47:32 ►
we are handling them for an element of disrespect my experience with with the
00:47:37 ►
psychedelics at any rate is that if you disrespect them they will give you a
00:47:41 ►
thoroughly profound kicking and they will they will
00:47:45 ►
show you exactly what that disrespect was and and they will teach you not to
00:47:50 ►
do it again so I actually think the plants are are able to to look after
00:47:55 ►
themselves to to a large to a large extent the idea of the plants becoming
00:48:01 ►
angry with us doesn’t ring with me.
00:48:05 ►
I think that that would be, I don’t know, that would be like us becoming angry with a blackbird or a robin, you know, because it sits on a branch.
00:48:16 ►
I mean, I think the plant intelligence ultimately is so far beyond our own intelligence that they would not feel anger with us, perhaps pity, perhaps seek another way
00:48:26 ►
to help us round the problems. I realize that there’s a whole kind of industrialization of
00:48:32 ►
cannabis going on. And it’s a horrible thought, but maybe it won’t be long before Monsanto is in
00:48:36 ►
there, you know, making billions out of cannabis as well. And as we go forward in this, I think
00:48:44 ►
we need to keep in mind the issue of freedom.
00:48:47 ►
That we don’t want to hand these plants over to big controlling corporations. They’re the ones
00:48:54 ►
who’ve been responsible for all the wrongs. We don’t want to hand them over to them. We want to
00:49:00 ►
keep the right place for this is in individual hands, making decisions about our own lives and working with the plants,
00:49:07 ►
not in an industrialized, profit-driven, commercialized way,
00:49:11 ►
but in a sacred way.
00:49:13 ►
I’ve found over the years that, with psychedelics, for sure,
00:49:18 ►
an element of ceremony is really important.
00:49:22 ►
Let’s remember that actually what we’re dealing with here
00:49:24 ►
is a vast cosmic intelligence,
00:49:27 ►
some kind of goddess.
00:49:29 ►
And we must give her respect.
00:49:31 ►
And if we give respect,
00:49:33 ►
if we honor her with ceremony,
00:49:35 ►
if we keep our intentions pure,
00:49:38 ►
then the results will be positive.
00:49:40 ►
And part of the revolution that’s taking place
00:49:42 ►
is to take power away from the big is to take power away from the big
00:49:45 ►
corporations, take power away from the big governments, take power away from the big media.
00:49:50 ►
And we must do that consciously in everything and everything we do regarding plants as well.
00:49:57 ►
Yes. Yeah. So your question is, I talk about being a heretic.
00:50:05 ►
What about my own journey?
00:50:07 ►
What happened with me?
00:50:09 ►
That’s a bit self-indulgent if I do too much of that.
00:50:11 ►
But just briefly, for some reason, which I don’t understand, I’ve always been an outsider.
00:50:21 ►
It may be the fact that I’m an only child.
00:50:23 ►
I had three siblings, but they all died
00:50:25 ►
in childhood. I didn’t grow up in a large family, and this made me, I don’t know, somehow stand back
00:50:34 ►
in a way from the rest of us. I never found myself at the center of anything. I always found myself
00:50:39 ►
on the edges of stuff, and I always regarded myself as a marginal person, out there in the margins.
00:50:46 ►
And I think out there in the margins
00:50:47 ►
is a good place to be,
00:50:49 ►
because that’s where change happens in society.
00:50:51 ►
If we lock ourselves into the center,
00:50:54 ►
then we’re in a place of no change,
00:50:56 ►
a place of stasis.
00:50:58 ►
Out on the margins,
00:50:59 ►
things can’t change.
00:51:01 ►
I’ve never feared about speaking my truth.
00:51:06 ►
I spoke…
00:51:07 ►
Some of you will know I had a very long relationship with cannabis.
00:51:13 ►
I still do, actually.
00:51:15 ►
But for 24 years, I came to cannabis late.
00:51:18 ►
I came to cannabis in 1987 when I was 37 years old.
00:51:24 ►
I really only had a few joints before that.
00:51:29 ►
But I got into it in a serious way in 1987.
00:51:32 ►
And I carried on.
00:51:33 ►
And then, come about 1992, I discovered that I could write under the influence of cannabis.
00:51:41 ►
I used to keep it that I only smoked at evenings and weekends but then
00:51:45 ►
I found it was you know writing a book can involve sitting in a chair for 16
00:51:50 ►
hours a day and that brings a kind of physical boredom and cannabis relieved
00:51:56 ►
that for me and it didn’t stop me working and writing and I I started to
00:52:00 ►
use cannabis 16 hours a day seven days a a week, without remit. And I began to plan my life
00:52:07 ►
around cannabis. If I were going to go to another country, I would want to have local contacts on
00:52:13 ►
the ground who could get me a good supply of bud, because otherwise I wouldn’t be enjoying myself.
00:52:18 ►
And I didn’t realize that in a way, I was becoming the servant of the plant, and it was no longer serving me. And
00:52:27 ►
it was a series of ayahuasca sessions in Brazil in 2011 that stopped me dead in my tracks.
00:52:35 ►
And I was shown that my relationship with cannabis had become abusive, and that it was
00:52:41 ►
leading me not to be the person I wanted to be, that I wasn’t nurturing, I wasn’t generous.
00:52:46 ►
I was rather suspicious and doubtful about everybody around me.
00:52:50 ►
And I was shown that I absolutely had to stop.
00:52:53 ►
And it wasn’t even difficult to stop.
00:52:55 ►
When I got home, I found I actually couldn’t smoke cannabis.
00:52:57 ►
I was physically revolted by it.
00:52:59 ►
So three years passed completely without any cannabis at all.
00:53:05 ►
Absolutely none.
00:53:06 ►
I found it didn’t affect my writing.
00:53:08 ►
In a way, my writing got quicker and better.
00:53:11 ►
And I felt good about that.
00:53:13 ►
Then I was on the Joe Rogan Experience in September 2014 in Los Angeles.
00:53:23 ►
And Joe asked me, well, so how’s it going with you and cannabis
00:53:25 ►
and I I said well I’m still not smoking any cannabis three years have passed now
00:53:30 ►
but I’m beginning to wonder if I could dip my toes back in the water so Joe
00:53:36 ►
says why don’t you start now and pulls out this lovely joint of California bud
00:53:41 ►
and lights it up so we smoked it right there, live on air.
00:53:46 ►
And I really liked it. I must say that three years without smoking cannabis does wonders
00:53:53 ►
for your tolerance level. You know, a bit of a joint before then would have had almost
00:53:59 ►
no effect on me. This completely blew me away. And I still had to handle an hour and a half of
00:54:05 ►
the conversation with Joe. Then at the end of it, at the end of the conversation, I was still flying.
00:54:12 ►
And I had a rented car outside. I couldn’t drive it. So I had to call my wife to come and collect
00:54:17 ►
me and take me home. But I did enjoy that cannabis. And then I did a road trip which took me across
00:54:24 ►
Washington state where cannabis is legal and across Washington state where cannabis is legal.
00:54:27 ►
And across Oregon state where cannabis is legal.
00:54:29 ►
And I had access to more and I enjoyed that more as well.
00:54:33 ►
So I thought maybe I can go back to some kind of new relationship with cannabis.
00:54:39 ►
And what I’ve come to is that I will occasionally take cannabis in the form of oil.
00:54:44 ►
I take cannabis in the form of oil. I take
00:54:45 ►
cannabis oil orally. I like oral cannabis because it lasts for such a
00:54:51 ►
long time. Five hours, you know, in that very positive state. I’m resolved that I
00:54:57 ►
will not write under the influence of cannabis. That I will use it in a sacred
00:55:03 ►
way with respect. I love the sensuality of cannabis.
00:55:08 ►
That’s, to me, one of the very important things about it. It brings me back into contact with my
00:55:12 ►
senses in a way that I value. And so I intend to continue working with cannabis, mainly in the
00:55:18 ►
form of cannabis oil, but not to allow it to become a dominant influence in my life.
00:55:30 ►
I want to steer my life and I want to benefit from this beautiful plant in a way rather than get completely bent out of shape.
00:55:34 ►
I don’t think it was the cannabis that bent me out of shape.
00:55:36 ►
I think it was my own internal nature that bent me out of shape,
00:55:39 ►
which the cannabis revealed.
00:55:41 ►
So I think the important thing about being a heretic is just to speak out,
00:55:45 ►
speak the truth, tell your truth, even if it’s risky, even if there’s a danger in doing so,
00:55:51 ►
speak it out. The more of us who speak out, the more of us who come out of the psychedelic closet
00:55:55 ►
and speak openly about it, the more likely we are to get change. And the more likely it is that we
00:56:04 ►
will in due course have some kind of revolution in our society
00:56:07 ►
that will overthrow this dominator system that seeks to control our consciousness.
00:56:12 ►
One more question.
00:56:14 ►
Okay, three more questions.
00:56:16 ►
One, two, three, yes.
00:56:17 ►
It doesn’t make sense because there’s 150,000 different species of plants and trees in the Amazon
00:56:22 ►
and it would be an extraordinary
00:56:26 ►
scientific endeavor to fight to find those two and realize they work together by trial and error
00:56:33 ►
what the shamans say is the spirits taught them to do it uh and and how did the spirits teach them
00:56:39 ►
to do it well there’s a snuff in the amazon called yopo, which is a DMT snuff, which goes straight to the brain.
00:56:46 ►
You can inhale it through the nose.
00:56:49 ►
And in Yopo’s trances, they were given the recipe for ayahuasca.
00:56:54 ►
There were guiding spirits there who taught them.
00:56:56 ►
Now, this sounds absurd and crazy to anybody stuck into the Western materialist tradition.
00:57:02 ►
But who’s to say the western materialist tradition is right?
00:57:05 ►
Who’s to say that there aren’t other intelligences.
00:57:08 ►
And other entities.
00:57:09 ►
And other forms of consciousness.
00:57:11 ►
That we are simply too locked down.
00:57:13 ►
And closed in to see.
00:57:15 ►
And that these ancient and sacred plants.
00:57:17 ►
Allow us to make contact with.
00:57:20 ►
For our benefit.
00:57:22 ►
For our benefit.
00:57:24 ►
Yes.
00:57:27 ►
Thank you. For our benefit. For our benefit. Yes. Have I ever met other entities?
00:57:39 ►
All the time.
00:57:42 ►
All the time.
00:57:44 ►
You know, it’s a curious thing the the notion of the
00:57:48 ►
entity behind ayahuasca in the Amazon there are a number of tribes who regard
00:57:55 ►
the spirit of ayahuasca as male as masculine but here in the West the
00:58:02 ►
universal experience of people drinking ayahuasca is that they’re communicating with a feminine entity.
00:58:08 ►
And the phrase mother ayahuasca, or the grandmother, is very frequently used.
00:58:17 ►
And in a way, we in the West are having the kind of intimate contact with a goddess that the ancient Greeks had with Athena or Venus.
00:58:29 ►
A goddess who speaks to us and communicates with us.
00:58:32 ►
So yes, I have met Mother Ayahuasca many times.
00:58:36 ►
She has wrapped me in her coils of a giant serpent and rested her head on my shoulder and just looked in my eyes, unblinking, for two hours.
00:58:47 ►
And the message was, if you don’t learn to love yourself, you’ll be no use at loving anybody else.
00:58:54 ►
Because I was going through a period of self-hatred at that time, and I got just the message I needed.
00:59:00 ►
With smoked DMT, and my God, that is a rocket ship to the other side of reality.
00:59:10 ►
I mean, ayahuasca, the active ingredient is DMT, but it’s absorbed orally because we raised
00:59:19 ►
the issue of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor in the ayahuasca vine and allowing the DMT to be absorbed orally,
00:59:25 ►
there’s negotiation with the experience. You can resist it if you want to, although that’s
00:59:32 ►
not a very good idea. But with smoked DMT, once you hit the dose, there’s no negotiation
00:59:39 ►
whatsoever. You’re going to be taken where it takes you, whether you want it or not.
00:59:44 ►
You’re going to be taken where it takes you, whether you want it or not.
00:59:54 ►
And on one occasion, where I had a massive, very disturbing DMT trip in Utah,
01:00:01 ►
I found myself, I got the fourth hit on the pipe before I fell back,
01:00:06 ►
and then I found myself in a place which was utterly confusing and strange. And then a voice spoke in my ear and it said, you’re ours now. And I said,
01:00:14 ►
fuck yes, but only for 12 minutes. And there I was there for those 12 minutes. And then
01:00:22 ►
when I came out and back into the room, I didn’t even know what a room was
01:00:27 ►
or where I was or who I was.
01:00:31 ►
But in that encounter, I met an entity
01:00:33 ►
that I meet many times with DMT
01:00:35 ►
who I call the trickster.
01:00:37 ►
And he comes in a male form
01:00:39 ►
and he’s very tall and lean
01:00:41 ►
and he makes peculiar hand movements
01:00:43 ►
as though he’s stretching out pieces of wire
01:00:45 ►
and those hand movements seem to me to be a kind of communication that something
01:00:50 ►
something is being downloaded into me which i’m not yet ready to read um so in answer to your
01:00:56 ►
question yeah i do meet entities uh a lot uh and you know what i can’t prove it. I absolutely can’t prove that they aren’t just figments of my brain on drugs.
01:01:07 ►
But I think they’re real. I think reality is much more complicated than we’ve been taught.
01:01:13 ►
I think it’s multi-layered, it’s multi-dimensional. We are locked in to channel normal.
01:01:19 ►
We are plugged in to the physical realm. We need to be. There’s nothing wrong with that.
01:01:24 ►
We need to know the laws of physics.
01:01:26 ►
If I didn’t know the laws of physics,
01:01:27 ►
I might step off this stage, and that would hurt.
01:01:30 ►
And be very muddy.
01:01:32 ►
But that’s not the only
01:01:33 ►
aspect of reality. There is so much
01:01:36 ►
more beyond it, and the gift of the plants
01:01:38 ►
is that they allow us to gain
01:01:40 ►
access to that wider reality.
01:01:42 ►
And at the same time, to realize
01:01:44 ►
how limiting, how
01:01:46 ►
controlling, how negative,
01:01:48 ►
how utterly ghastly
01:01:50 ►
the social structures that we have
01:01:51 ►
created actually are.
01:01:54 ►
So,
01:01:56 ►
okay, one more,
01:01:58 ►
one more.
01:02:01 ►
Do I
01:02:02 ►
believe or think that by taking DMT
01:02:04 ►
in one form or another,
01:02:05 ►
it can possibly change my DNA or genetic makeup?
01:02:09 ►
I think you’d have to ask David Nutt that.
01:02:12 ►
I’m not a scientist.
01:02:15 ►
I’m not sure how it works.
01:02:17 ►
I mean, we are discovering that experiences of famine, for example, 200 years ago,
01:02:23 ►
are making an impact on DNA. That goes quite against,
01:02:26 ►
you know, the basic Darwinian idea, epigenetics, but it does seem to be happening. So why not?
01:02:33 ►
Why shouldn’t these experiences change our DNA in some way? How else can I explain the
01:02:40 ►
fact? I’ve talked to a number of people over the last month. Four of them, four of them
01:02:45 ►
in different cities were people
01:02:47 ►
who had been diagnosed with terminal
01:02:49 ►
cancer. The medical
01:02:51 ►
establishment had washed their hands of
01:02:54 ►
them. All they could offer them
01:02:55 ►
were extremely painful
01:02:57 ►
chemo and radiotherapies, which
01:02:59 ►
utterly ruined the quality of their lives.
01:03:02 ►
Each one of these four individuals
01:03:03 ►
took the decision to go down to the Amazon and drink ayahuas lives. Each one of these four individuals took the decision to go down
01:03:06 ►
to the Amazon and drink ayahuasca.
01:03:08 ►
Each one of them went
01:03:10 ►
into remission.
01:03:11 ►
And they are still in remission today.
01:03:14 ►
And their doctors can’t understand
01:03:15 ►
why this has happened. That’s anecdotal.
01:03:18 ►
We need more science on this.
01:03:22 ►
Is that the power of the brain
01:03:24 ►
over the mind?
01:03:26 ►
Maybe. I don’t know.
01:03:31 ►
I mean, my view is that we are fundamentally not our bodies.
01:03:33 ►
I said that at the beginning.
01:03:34 ►
We are our consciousness.
01:03:37 ►
It’s the consciousness that matters. And if the consciousness is at a low level,
01:03:40 ►
where it’s jingoistic and deeply involved in, you know, nationalism and racism,
01:03:46 ►
then that consciousness will not be able to manage the business of the body very well.
01:03:51 ►
If the consciousness is elevated to a higher level,
01:03:54 ►
then I have no doubt that that consciousness can impact bodily health in extraordinary ways.
01:03:59 ►
And maybe that’s why ayahuasca is producing these extraordinary remissions in cancers.
01:04:05 ►
I would like to see more science done on this.
01:04:08 ►
Less anecdotal work.
01:04:09 ►
Let’s prove it.
01:04:10 ►
Let’s prove it scientifically that ayahuasca is producing remission of cancer.
01:04:16 ►
And then let’s see what our fucking governments do with it.
01:04:19 ►
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
01:04:21 ►
Thank you.
01:04:22 ►
Thank you.
01:04:22 ►
Thank you.
01:04:24 ►
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And can I
01:04:27 ►
just say, can I just say, it was an absolute honor to speak on the same stage as Professor
01:04:34 ►
David Knight. This is a man who speaks his truth, who speaks his truth, and his name
01:04:42 ►
is going to go down in history. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
01:04:45 ►
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
01:04:52 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:04:54 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:04:59 ►
Again, I’d like to thank fellow salonner Paul Harley
01:05:02 ►
for recording this talk and Dr. David Nutt’s talk that
01:05:06 ►
I podcast two days ago. And I apologize for taking so long to get these talks out to the salon.
01:05:12 ►
However, I do think that they have both come at a good time for us to learn from.
01:05:17 ►
So thanks again, Paul. I really appreciate your contribution to the salon.
01:05:22 ►
After listening to this talk with you, I now wish that I’d been
01:05:25 ►
better organized and podcasted shortly after it was given. You know, I’ve heard Graham Hancock
01:05:31 ►
speak in person on several occasions, as well as having the opportunity to visit with him a little
01:05:36 ►
bit. But I must admit that from the last time I saw him until listening to him today, it seems to
01:05:42 ►
me that something has changed in him. There’s a fire
01:05:45 ►
in his belly, and now I’m planning on following his work more closely from now on. You know,
01:05:51 ►
I’ve always been drawn to his books and lectures, but after this talk, I’ve come to realize how
01:05:56 ►
close he and I are in our view of the world, and I’m now his biggest fan. Do you remember
01:06:03 ►
early on in this talk when he mentioned that Terrence McKenna story?
01:06:07 ►
Well, if you’re a long-time listener here in the salon,
01:06:10 ►
you will also remember hearing Terrence tell that story himself.
01:06:14 ►
And I wish that I could tell you which podcast it was in,
01:06:17 ►
but I’ve now posted over 275 programs that feature Terrence McKenna.
01:06:23 ►
And even when I was younger,
01:06:25 ►
well, there was just no way that I could remember
01:06:28 ►
which podcast his various stories were in.
01:06:31 ►
But if you happen to remember where it can be found,
01:06:34 ►
I would be eternally grateful if you’d post it
01:06:36 ►
in the comments section of the program notes for this podcast,
01:06:40 ►
which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:06:43 ►
And didn’t you love it when he said,
01:06:46 ►
Whenever I travel the world, I find that people are exactly the same.
01:06:50 ►
The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams, the same capacity to love.
01:06:55 ►
We are, none of us, any different.
01:06:59 ►
I learned this myself by traveling for sure,
01:07:02 ►
but it really hit home when I became close friends with a
01:07:05 ►
Vietnamese man who was orphaned at the age of eight when an American bomb accidentally was
01:07:11 ►
dropped on his home. Now, over several years, we became really close friends, and the deeper we got
01:07:17 ►
into conversations about life, the more clear it became that our differences in culture, race, and language were simply impediments to
01:07:26 ►
reaching an understanding of who we actually were. And we discovered that at our most basic level,
01:07:33 ►
we were exactly alike. And you know, that goes for you and me too. At our cores, we share a common
01:07:40 ►
humanity, and the intelligent use of psychedelics, I think, is a good way to imprint this truth on
01:07:46 ►
us all. And on that note, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.